Ukrainian leaders have blown their chance to find a favorable exit from the country’s conflict with Moscow, so any agreement to end the fighting will be inferior to the deal from which President Vladimir Zelensky walked away in March 2022, a top Russian diplomat has claimed.
“Ze’s Ukraine has squandered its chances for such a favorable off-ramp,” Russia’s deputy UN ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said on Saturday in an X (formerly Twitter) post. “Any possible deal now will be reflecting its capitulation.”
Polyanskiy made his comment in response to a claim by Michael McFaul, a prominent anti-Russia figure in the West, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never serious about forging a peace agreement with Ukraine. The Russian diplomat was apparently referring to a preliminary deal reached at peace talks hosted by Türkiye in March 2022. Putin later held up the agreement at a meeting with African leaders, saying Ukrainian leaders had thrown it into “the garbage dump of history.”